Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) save lives, strengthen public systems, and protect workers. Closing them makes Ontario less safe.
Ontario is in a toxic drug crisis. Loved ones die every day from an unregulated and unpredictable drug supply. Families are grieving and communities are carrying the weight. At the same time, government policy choices are forcing workers across sectors to respond to preventable emergencies—in libraries, shelters, parks, community centers, emergency rooms, and other public spaces.
The Ford government’s decision to close CTS pushes preventable emergencies into public spaces and puts even more pressure on workers and already-strained public services. CTS are a necessary part of a full spectrum of services and supports that our communities need to be well: that includes harm reduction services, access to a range of voluntary, evidence-based treatment options, and basic needs like safe housing, adequate income, connection to culture, and robust public health care. The Ford government has claimed their HART Hub model justifies closing lifesaving CTS amid a crisis. In doing so, they incorrectly argue that HART hubs, which mandate abstinence as a goal, are an adequate crisis response on their own. The truth is, some people who use drugs do not need or want treatment, or are not ready or able to seek it out. Their safety and lives still matter. There are many pathways to well-being: we need to expand those pathways, not narrow them.
As of May 2026, more than a year after their initial announcement, communities report that many HART Hubs are still not fully operational.
CTS Closures Are a Workers’ Issue
CTS keep our communities safer: they shift drug use out of public spaces and into safer environments, prevent deaths and injuries, and connect people with care. For people often shut out of mainstream care, CTS offer not only basic health services, but accessibility, dignity, and connection to longer-term supports. These are proven services with decades of evidence showing their effective role in our health system.
By closing CTS, the Ford government is moving drug use from supervised, safer spaces into washrooms, parks, shelters, libraries, and emergency rooms, leaving workers across sectors to respond without adequate resources or support.
Paramedics have been clear that CTS reduce pressure on emergency services by safely managing overdoses, freeing up ambulances to respond to other calls. Library, municipal, and school board workers have spoken out about how without supervised consumption sites, they have been thrust onto the frontlines, administering Naloxone and navigating medical emergencies and complex situations at their workplaces. Nurses and other workers in hospitals, already managing unrealistic workloads without necessary supports, are now managing care in emergency rooms and ICUs for people experiencing overdoses – care that previously happened at supervised consumption sites.
Workers need public services that prevent emergencies–not policy decisions that make those emergencies more frequent and severe.
This Is a Rights Issue
People who use drugs have the right to life, health, dignity, safety, and equal access to care. These rights do not disappear because a person is poor, unhoused, Indigenous, racialized, disabled, queer, or criminalized.
The Ford government is moving in the wrong direction. Amid this crisis, Ontario should be expanding access to lifesaving care. Instead, the province is closing CTS, restricting evidence-based harm reduction, and increasing punitive responses to people who are unhoused or visibly poor. Our elected leaders are choosing to criminalize and punish the people most exposed to provincial policy failures.
Encampments, public drug use, and visible suffering are symptoms of deeper crises. They are not solved by tickets, arrests, displacement, or forcing people out of sight. Criminalization makes people less safe, pushes people away from support, increases stigma, and adds pressure to public systems that are already overburdened.
We need approaches that address the roots of this crisis: a toxic drug supply, poverty, lack of housing, and under-resourced public services.
Solidarity Means Refusing Abandonment
CUPE has a long history of fighting for public services, workplace safety, human rights, and the dignity of people harmed by political choices. Drug policy belongs in that same fight.
Solidarity means refusing the idea that some people deserve care while others deserve punishment. It means recognizing that workers responding to drug poisonings, workers who use drugs, and community members facing the toxic drug crisis all deserve safety, dignity, and support.
We can build real safety through public systems that work: CTS, harm reduction, voluntary evidence-based treatment, safe and supportive housing, income supports, low-barrier health care, mental health supports, Indigenous-led services, and well-resourced public systems.
A serious provincial response requires every tool that keeps people alive and supports community well-being.
CUPE Members Can Fight Back
The Ford government must re-open CTS, restore and expand harm reduction services, fund voluntary and evidence-based public treatment, invest in housing and low-barrier care, and stop criminalizing people already suffering under flawed systems.
Closing CTS will increase preventable emergencies in public spaces and place even more pressure on workers across sectors who are already carrying the impacts of a failing system.
Drug policy is a worker issue. It is a rights issue. It is a solidarity issue.